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For the half-year to 30 June 2015, the IPKat's regular team is supplemented by contributions from guest bloggers Suleman Ali, Tom Ohta and Valentina Torelli.

Regular round-ups of the previous week's blogposts are kindly compiled by Alberto Bellan.

Wednesday, 28 November 2012

As reported by
theFinancial Times, yesterday
Google launched a public campaign calledDefend Your Net.This is an attempt
to stop Germany passing legislation that would allow publishers to charge
internet search engines for displaying links to newspaper articles on services
like Google News (seeearlier
1709 Blog reporthere).

The Bundestag is supposed to discuss what has come to be known as theLex Google or Google Tax tomorrow.

The draft
legislation is backed by
Chancellor Angela Merkel's ruling coalition of Christian Democrats and Free
Democrats, and is intended to recoup some of the revenues traditional publishers
have lost to the web. The German association of newspaper publishers says that newspaper
revenues fell 20% to €11bn per year between 2000 and 2009 as readers and advertisers
migrated to the internet. In2011
the decline in advertising revenues
(-1.2 percent) was however considerably smaller than in 2009 (-15.9 percent) (some additional data can be foundhere).

Embarrassed Oscar caught in one of those rare moments not spent reading financial news online

If passed (this
should happen sometime next summer), the bill would introduce an ancillary right
for press publishers. This would result in search engines having to seek publishers'
permission for displaying links and snippets and also pay a licence fee for their
use.

As explained by
theDaily Business Post, the proposed
piece of legislation would give publishers the exclusive right to make commercial uses of their journalistic contents in the year following their publication.

Google's Defend Your Net campaign contains also a
page dedicated to10 factsabout intellectual property. Among the other things, Google points out that
publishers can already decide whether they want their pages be found through
Search. In addition, not only is the Google News service completely free of
advertising, but it directs as many as 45% of a German news website's readers
via google.de.

There were times when news services clearly involved acts of communication to the public

Overall such a
law,claimsGoogle, would
damage the German economy, threaten the
diversity of information, result in massive legal uncertainty, set
back innovative media and copyright and cause a market economy paradox.

In the
meanwhile, Mozilla has joined Google in its battle against the Lex Google. In a
blogpostpublished earlier today, Mozilla has made it clear that

[the proposed legislation] may be bad for users
and the web. If snippets and headlines require licence fees, the ability to
locate information may be curtailed as search engines could (and likely will)
simply remove the publishers from their index - an approach Google has already
taken in Belgium. If this happens, locating the news becomes more difficult.
Imposition of licence fees in this context may also reduce competition by
making it more difficult for new entrants who cannot pay such fees, and
unintentionally favouring well-funded players who can pay.

We’ll see
what the future holds for the German Lex Google. In any case, it is apparent
that, should the bill be approved in the end, it would set a strong precedent
which is likely to induce other European countries (eg France: seehere and
here) to imitate Germany and ask Google to pay for displaying links to and snippets
of newspaper articles.

This Kat reckons
that many interests are at stake here. However, she wonders whether some
guidance on the actual legitimacy of services like Google News may come from
the Court of Justice of the European Union, which has just been asked to consider
whether linking may be tantamount to an act of communication, as per Article
3(1) of the InfoSoc Directive.

1 comment:

The union of scribes will tomorrow lobby Albert II, uncrowned King of Germany, for a change in the law which will impose a tax on the reproduction of words. Currently very few people are literate and therefore any books which are produced are expensive and limited to a small number of topics. However, a new invention by Johannes Gensfleisch zur Laden zum Gutenberg is expected to change all this.

The invention, known as a 'printing press' will enable people other than scribes to produce documents and books on whatever topic they like. Such a dramatic change may improve literacy and freedom of speech and lead to open democratic rule. Only time will tell if these are good for mankind.

Asked whether the new technology is justified for an open and informed society and why they didn't choose to embrace the new business model, the ancient scribes simply shrugged and said it was tradition that the proletariat should receive their news in handwriting, not print.